The trials and executions of Fisher and More, which Henry supervised from Windsor, delayed the start of the summer Progress by a few days. The original intention had been to leave on 5 July, but it was not until the 9th that the royal party set out. Despite the blood-letting and the unseasonably wet weather, the Court was in high spirits: Henry was ‘more given to matters of dancing and of ladies than ever he was’; while Anne and her henchman Cromwell, ‘who are omnipotent with [the King]’, were in confident political control.1
It was time, this ruling clique had decided, to turn from lopping heads to winning hearts and minds, and the Progress was to be the means.
For Anne, despite her stridency and the divisiveness of her actions, was by no means indifferent to public opinion. Even Chapuys recognised the fact. ‘This woman’, he reported in May 1533, on the eve of her coronation procession, ‘does all she can to gain the goodwill of Londoners’. Naturally, Chapuys was sure that she would fail: ‘she deceives herself ’, he asserted. On the basis of a simple head-count he was right. For good Catholics, especially for good Catholic women, no name was too bad for her. And good, or at least conventional, Catholics were in the overwhelming majority. But revolutions are not made by majorities, and the views of Evangelicals and Reformers were very different. For them, Anne was a protector and a patron in the present and a beacon of hope for the future.2
There were, of course, far fewer Reformers than Catholics. But their numbers were increasing. Nor, in any case, were numbers everything. For the Reformers were in strategic positions. They had masterful preachers and the control of the printing-presses. They commanded, for the moment, the levers of power and patronage. And in parts of the country they had local roots. One of these areas was London, which Anne had wooed in 1533. Another was the west country, which was her destination on the Progress of 1535.3
Bristol, the regional capital, was second only to London as a trading city and economic centre–and, as in London, a significant number of both the merchant élite and the common citizens of Bristol were early converts to Reform. The remote valleys of the Cotswolds were also a stronghold of the pre-Reformation English heresy known as Lollardy, whose principal tenets, such as the importance of being able to read the Bible in English, merged easily with the ‘New’ developments in religion. Here, at West Kington, was Hugh Latimer’s parish, whence he descended on nearby Bristol (so the conservative local clergy felt) like the wolf on the fold, doing ‘much hurt among the people by his…preaching, and soweth errors’. Equally, many local gentry in Gloucestershire and Wiltshire were sympathetic to Reform and a handful went further and became committed supporters. They included Richard Tracy, M.P. of Stanway in Gloucester, whose father William had acquired notoriety by his sensationally anticlerical Will; Sir Edward Baynton of Bromham, who was Vice-chamberlain of Anne’s Household and Latimer’s correspondent and protector; Sir John and Lady Walsh of Little Sodbury, who had been won over by their children’s live-in tutor, William Tyndale, and Lady Walsh’s nephew, Nicholas Poyntz of Iron Acton.4
The Progress was designed to fertilise these west country roots of Reform with the rich humus of Court favour. The local gentry who were favourable to Reform–including Poyntz at Iron Acton, Walsh at Little Sodbury and Baynton at Bromham–were singled out for the honour of a visit from the King and Queen. For Bristol a royal entrée was planned which would, it was hoped, emulate the success of Anne’s coronation procession in London. Local clergy, like Latimer, who had the ear of the Court, were marked out for accelerated promotion. But what really showed that the Court meant business was that Cromwell was scheduled to join the Progress and remain with it for eight weeks. During this time, the government of England was wherever he happened to be. He used the opportunity to pilot daring schemes of Reform–and to disarm opposition with the magic of the royal presence. And, throughout, his most active co-adjutor was Anne herself. She managed Henry; wrote to Cromwell on his absences from Court, and, where necessary, took the initiative on the ground.5
One of the pageants at Anne’s coronation entrée had enjoined her to ‘prosper, proceed, and reign’. She evidently took the injunction to heart, and the Progress of 1535 shows her putting it enthusiastically into practice.
As usual, the route of the Progress or ‘gists’ had been planned carefully in advance. From Windsor, it followed the valleys of the Thames and its tributary the Evenlode; skirted the northern edge of the Cotswolds to the Vale of Evesham; and then, turning south and still keeping to the foothills of the Cotswolds, it passed via Sudeley Castle to Tewkesbury. En route, there were the usual frequent stops–to rest, to hunt, and, it turned out, to view property.
Ewelme in Oxfordshire, where the Court stayed for a couple of days on the 12th and the 13th, was a splendid red-brick palace built in the mid-fifteenth century by the de la Poles, dukes of Suffolk. Henry had been conceived there during an extended visit by his parents in the autumn of 1490. But the de la Poles, cursed by their Yorkist blood, dabbled repeatedly in treason. Their property and titles had been forfeit and had been re-granted by Henry to his then great favourite, Charles Brandon, who had been created Duke of Suffolk in 1513. But now Suffolk himself had fallen out of favour, thanks to his less than whole-hearted commitment to the Boleyn marriage. It was time to pay the price, and in the course of the Progress Anne and Henry inspected some of Suffolk’s properties which were ear-marked for surrender to the Crown.6
They included Ewelme and Hook Norton, where they probably hunted en route from Langley Castle to Sudeley. But they were not impressed with what they saw. Suffolk, trying to save what he could from the wreck, claimed to have spent £1,000 on Ewelme and £1,500 on a hunting lodge at Hook Norton. Henry, who rather liked bargaining, was brutally incredulous. He had recently visited Ewelme, his agent was instructed to inform Suffolk on 29 July, and had ‘viewed’ the property. He found it ‘in great decay and great sums would not repair [it]’. As for Hook Norton, ‘it will require no small sums of money to repair and build it after the King’s mind’. Henry also hinted that he had seen little trace of the eighty red deer which the Keeper was supposed to maintain in the park. Let Suffolk stop quibbling, the King’s instructions ended. Instead, he, ‘of all men’, should consider the ‘manifold benefits’ he had received from the King. Henry had ‘advanced him to his honour and estate’; he could just as easily undo him.7
Anne, no doubt, had been irritated by the lack of sport at Hook Norton as well. But the hunting-down of another of her old enemies offered some compensation.
After this diversion, the Progress got down to its intended business at Sudeley Castle. The King and Queen and their immediate servants stayed in the Castle. But many of their entourage, including Cromwell, who arrived on or about 23 July, were lodged in the nearby Winchcombe Abbey.
Rarely has hospitality been worse returned. Winchcombe itself survived till 1539. But by 1540 the last of England’s monasteries had gone, their land and buildings confiscated by the Crown, and a thousand years of religious life and ritual had come to an end. And the process which led to all this–the Dissolution of the Monasteries–began here, at Winchcombe, while Cromwell was staying under the Abbey roof in 1535. Thence, he launched it and directed it. And he did so with Anne’s eager, high-profile involvement.
Quite whether the full-scale Dissolution was envisaged from the beginning is another matter, however.
In January 1535, Cromwell had been appointed Henry’s Vicegerent-in-Spirituals. The office, which was a new-fangled one, made him the King’s deputy as Supreme Head of the Church, with full authority to exercise the vast powers which the Supremacy conferred on the Crown. Among these was the power to ‘visit’ or inspect monasteries. The power, traditionally exercised by the local bishop, was an ancient one. But the purpose to which it was now put was almost wholly new.
The articles for the visitation of 1535 were relatively innocuous. But the sting in the tail came in the form of the injunctions, or orders to reform, which were to be issued to the monks after the inspection was complete. These injunctions, drawn up in full consultation with Henry himself, required the abbot and brethren to enforce and obey the recent Oath of Obedience and the Acts ‘made or to be made’ for the ‘extirpation…of the usurped and pretended jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome’–as the Pope was now insultingly styled. Such of them as were priests were also ‘everyday in [their] mass [to] pray for…the King and his most noble and lawful wife Queen Anne’. It was a prayer which would stick in the throat of any but the most compliant.8
Then came a Reforming attack on the religious ceremonies which were the raison d’être of monastic life. The abbot was to explain that ‘true religion’ was not a matter of observing the traditional rules and customs–‘apparel, manner of going, shaven heads…nor in silence, fasting, uprising at night, singing and such other kinds of ceremonies’. Instead, it was ‘cleanness of mind, pureness of living, Christ’s faith not feigned and brotherly charity’.
Another Reforming bête noire was the monasteries’ central role in popular piety as places of pilgrimage to miracle-working images or relics. These images and relics offered comfort to the people, as well as providing nice little earners for the monks. But, the injunctions sternly required, all such displays were to stop. Instead, sober charity was to be substituted for the heady satisfactions of religious mysteries, and would-be pilgrims were to be told ‘to give that to the poor that they thought to offer to their images or relics’.
Finally, despite their professed contempt for religious ‘ceremonies’, the injunctions proceeded to impose with unparalleled severity the traditional restrictions of monastic life: ‘enclosure’ (that is, the requirement to remain within the monastery), the exclusion of women, and simplicity of food, drink, dress and manner of life. Most problematic was enclosure. This was covered by the Injunction which required ‘that no monk or [lay] brother…by any means go forth of the precincts of the same’. If enclosure were literally enforced, the economic infrastructure of monastic life would collapse. Rents could not be collected nor produce sold, and bankruptcy or starvation would quickly overwhelm the community.9
This Injunction, like the rest, was probably formulated in reasonably good faith. (Henry was always very keen that other people should observe their obligations.) But its potential to harm monastic life was soon spotted–and exploited.
Cromwell briefed his agents, known as visitors, at Winchcombe, and they sallied forth in different directions. Their subsequent reports concentrated on two areas: the sexual failings of the monks, on which subject (like today’s Sunday-newspaper reporters) the visitors managed to combine intense disapproval with lip-smacking detail, and the false miracles and relics, of which they gave equally gloating accounts. One monastery, however, was spared the usual run of visitors, only to be subject to a more high-powered inquisition. This was Hailes, which lay a mere two miles to the north-east of Winchcombe.
Hailes owned a relic of the Holy Blood of Christ. This was not the mystic blood–the wine that was made blood by consecration in the mass–but, supposedly, the Saviour’s actual blood which had been shed on Mount Calvary. It had even preserved a certain viscosity and the mere sight of it, so the faithful believed, would put them in a state of Grace. The presence of this relic had turned Hailes Abbey into one of the great pilgrimage centres of late medieval England. Now, it attracted Anne’s disapproving attention. According to William Latymer’s account, she, ‘being in progress at Winchcombe’, sent ‘certain of her chaplains and others [to Hailes]…truly and faithfully to view, search and examine by all possible means the truth [of the relic]’. Their verdict was damning: partly by testing the relic and partly by questioning its custodians, they discovered it to be ‘nothing else but the blood of some duck, or, as some say, red wax’.10
Latymer goes on to claim that Anne got Henry to order the immediate destruction of this irreligious fraud. This portion of his narrative, however, is mistaken since the relic survived until 1538, when it was formally investigated by Hugh Latimer and Richard Tracy, acting in their then capacity as royal commissioners. Following their discovery that, when removed from its outer casing, it was not blood at all but a yellowish, gum-like substance, it was sent up to London for public exposure and destruction.
Latimer, almost certainly, had been a member of the earlier investigation team sent by Anne; so too, probably, was John Hilsey, who delivered the sermon on the occasion of the relic’s final exposure at St Paul’s Cross, the great outdoor London pulpit, in November 1538. In 1535, Hilsey had been Prior of the Black Friars in Bristol and rising rapidly at Court. With his local knowledge, he had been the likely source of the story, accepted by Anne’s investigators, that the relic was duck’s blood. Certainly, he repeated this description in another sermon preached in February 1538. In the November sermon, however, he made a retraction of this earlier assertion and instead, drawing on the commissioner’s recent report, showed the relic to be ‘honey coloured with saffron and lying like a gum’. He then offered it up for general inspection!11
After Sudeley, the 1535 Progress went to Tewkesbury and then, following the course of the Severn Valley, it continued to Gloucester, Berkeley Castle and Thornbury Castle–that magnificent monument to the ambitions of the Duke of Buckingham, which had been left half-finished at his fall. The next scheduled stop was Bristol, which was the goal of the whole Progress. But now there came bad news. Plague had struck in Bristol and it was unsafe for Henry and Anne to enter the town. Instead, the town fathers came to Thornbury to pay their homage there. They presented Henry with gifts of livestock, to feed his itinerant Household, while to Anne they gave a parcel-gilt cup and cover filled with 100 marks (£66 13s 4d) in cash. The Queen replied prettily that she desired ‘to demand or have none other gift’ but only that she should be able to return to Bristol in the future.12
The intended route now took the King and Queen to Nicholas Poyntz’s house at Iron Acton. Poyntz had made lavish preparations to receive his sovereigns. Building very quickly, to judge from the nonexistent foundations, he added a brand-new wing to his existing manor-house. On the first floor was a suite of three fine rooms, each over seventeen feet high, that replicated the King’s or Queen’s apartment in one of their own palaces. As in a royal palace, the rooms were arranged in an enfilade (that is to say, each opened directly into the other) and they were decorated in the latest style with tapestry, stucco and high-quality wall-paintings with roundels, grotesque work and other classical architectural features. Poyntz also provided all mod-cons and each room had a large fireplace and, next to it, a garderobe or lavatory, opening into the moat. Additionally, since feasting was a feature of entertaining royalty, he bought the latest table-ware, including blue-and-white tin-glazed earthenware and hugely expensive Venetian glass.
But, after all that, it is impossible to be sure whether the planned visit took place. Perhaps it was a victim of the delayed start to the Progress, and Poyntz was left alone in his expensive new buildings to gnash his teeth in disappointment. But there are several indications to the contrary. Poyntz was knighted, almost certainly that year and in reward for his hospitality, and was drawn by Holbein wearing his new chain of knighthood and striking a Frenchified pose that accords well with the avant-garde style of his building works. Excavations of the moat have also come up with many broken fragments of his new earthenware and Venetian glass, suggesting that his royal guests had dined well, if not wisely.13
In any case, Anne would have found herself supremely at home at Iron Acton. The layout of the rooms was familiar. The combination of advanced, Frenchified taste with religious radicalism reflected perfectly the ethos of her own Court. Finally, there was the added satisfaction of knowing that Nicholas Poyntz was a convert: his grandfather, Sir Robert, had been Catherine’s Vice-chamberlain; now the grandson was dancing attendance on her.14
But Anne would have been even more satisfied still if she had been able to read a despatch written by Chapuys on 10 August. For the Progress, he reported gloomily, was achieving its aim of ‘gaining the people’. ‘It is said’, he continued, ‘that many of the peasants where [Henry] has passed, hearing the preachers who follow the Court, are so much abused as to believe that God has inspired the King to separate himself from the wife of his brother.’15
Since, until his departure on urgent personal business, the Court preachers included Latimer, the result is scarcely surprising. Nor was it only the country folk, the ‘bumpkins’ (idiotes) as Chapuys contemptuously describes them, who were won over. Of a quite different calibre was Mr Scrope, ‘a very worshipful gentleman’. Scrope had failed to swear the Oath of Obedience, not out of malice but only because of the slackness of the commissioners who were responsible for the imposition of the Oath. But, overwhelmed by Latimer’s preaching, he confessed his sin to him and was sent back to Court as Latimer’s ‘prisoner’, burning to serve Cromwell and the new regime. ‘Perchance he can tell you of more as far behindhand as he’, Latimer wrote to Cromwell, ‘only for lack of calling-on hitherto slow.’16
Now, more than ever, Anne was in her element. She next stayed at Little Sodbury, which belonged to Poyntz’s aunt and uncle, and after that at Bromham, the seat of her Vice-chamberlain Baynton. Baynton, as we have seen, was Latimer’s patron, while the Walshes at Little Sodbury had given refuge to Tyndale in the awkward days before he had fled abroad to escape Wolsey’s persecutions. Now, suddenly, Tyndale’s name moved to the top of the agenda again.
After going into exile, Tyndale’s main undertaking had been the translation of the Bible into English. He had completed his first version of the New Testament in 1526 and he was making good progress with the Old. He had also written important controversial works. One of these, the Obedience of a Christian Man, had been brought to Anne’s attention by one of her maids and she in turn had shown it to Henry. Her motives were a characteristic mixture: she did so partly because she approved of the work and partly to spite and thwart Wolsey. Henry, for his part, was mightily impressed with the thrust of Tyndale’s argument, which deduced from Scripture that the Christian had an absolute duty of obedience to the King, not to the Pope. ‘This book is for me and all Kings to read,’ he is supposed to have said.
But then Tyndale made the error–a fatal one as it turned out–of writing on the wrong side of the Great Matter. His Practice of Prelates spoke approvingly of Catherine; rubbished the King’s vaunted Scriptural arguments; and presented him as being led by the nose by Wolsey to seek the Divorce. Henry was enraged and made serious, if unsuccessful, attempts to secure Tyndale’s extradition.
Nevertheless, Anne, Cromwell and their friends continued, though discreetly, to try to bring about a reconciliation. Under their influence, Henry had announced a determination to make the Scriptures available to his people in an English translation. And Tyndale was incomparably the best translator. Anne had a fine copy of the revised 1534 edition of his New Testament, inscribed ‘Anne the Queen’ on the gilt fore-edge. And Cromwell’s correspondents, including Stephen Vaughan, were busy trying to keep channels open.17
The gap proved unbridgeable, however. Then fate struck, in the form of an English double-agent and agent-provocateur called Henry Philips. Having got Tyndale’s confidence and that of his host, the English merchant Thomas Poyntz, who came from the Essex branch of the family, Philips betrayed Tyndale to the Flemish authorities and he was arrested on 21 May 1535. The Council of the Emperor Charles V’s sister Mary, who had succeeded his aunt Margaret as Regent of the Netherlands, had hitherto turned a blind eye to Tyndale. The Council had enough to do, dealing with native heresy, without bothering about an Englishman who kept himself to himself and wrote and published only in a foreign tongue.18
But Philips had energy, contacts and, somehow, money and he continued to press the case against Tyndale. ‘I cannot perceive’, wrote Thomas Theobald to Cranmer, ‘by what [Philips] says, but that Tyndale shall die.’ ‘Which’, Theobald continued, ‘he procures with all diligent endeavour, rejoicing much thereat.’ It has been speculated that the source of Theobald’s money was the recently executed Sir Thomas More. In life, More had maintained a long and savage war of words with Tyndale, whom he regarded as an abominable heretic, fit only for the flames. Now, if the guess about Theobald’s funding be correct, More was having his revenge from beyond the grave.19
Cromwell and Anne were in a quandary. They wished to intervene on Tyndale’s behalf. But was it politic to do so? Finally Cromwell screwed up courage to speak to Henry. ‘To know the King’s pleasure touching Tyndale, and whether I shall write or not’, he noted in his ‘Remembrances’ or memoranda for early August. The resulting conversation probably took place at Thornbury, shortly before 16 August. Anne, then riding high, probably lent her voice as well and Henry’s consent was obtained. The necessary letters were written and forwarded to Stephen Vaughan in London. He received them on 4 September and sent them on promptly. And they reached their destination equally promptly.20
But the recipients on the Flemish Council were politely dismissive. ‘It were good’, Vaughan wrote to Cromwell, ‘that the King had a man of reputation in Flanders.’ That, however, was easier said than done. The Great Matter had led to an almost complete political breach between England and the Netherlands: trade–vital to both parties–continued, but that was all. In the circumstances, Philips, despite Thomas Poyntz’s increasingly desperate appeals to England, had the field to himself. He also procured the arrest of Poyntz, who escaped back to England only with difficulty. ‘If now you send but your letter to the [Flemish] Privy Council’, Vaughan wrote to Cromwell from Antwerp on 13 April 1536, ‘I could deliver Tyndale from the fire, so it came by time, for else it will be too late.’21
This letter was never sent. Anne, by then, was too worried about trying to save her own head. And Cromwell, from being her friend and ally, had become her deadliest enemy.
While the English Reformers feuded, Tyndale burned.
But during the Progress of 1535 the alliance between Queen and minister seemed closer than ever. It showed clearly in their co-operation in the rush of appointments to bishoprics, as four sees (or one fifth of the total) were filled in quick succession.
The vacancies had arisen for a variety of reasons. Rochester was freed by Fisher’s conviction and execution, and Hereford by Charles Booth’s death from natural causes in May 1535. At the same time, Parliament passed an Act seizing the English sees held by Henry’s Italian agents at the Papal Court. This created vacancies at Salisbury, where Campeggio had been Bishop, and at Worcester, which Wolsey had procured for his friend Ghinucci. And in place of a fervent, upright Catholic, such as Fisher, and supple, time-serving ones, such as Campeggio and Ghinucci, it was decided to appoint thorough-going Reformers.22
Anne clearly took the lead and the first appointment was that of her Almoner, Nicholas Shaxton, to Salisbury. The decision to appoint him was known to Chapuys as early as January 1535. But it followed a long and tortuous course.
The particular sticking-point, as always, was fees. Once, these had gone to the Pope, but with the Supremacy they were transferred to the King of England, and a new revenue department, the Office of First Fruits and Tenths, was set up to administer them. Its head, known as the Treasurer of First Fruits and Tenths, was John Gostwick. But, despite his new status, Gostwick’s relationship with Cromwell was an ambiguous one. He was Cromwell’s former servant and continued to act as a general treasurer for him. Moreover, he was also working in harness with Cromwell’s personal financial agents, Henry Polsted and William Popley.23
The resulting confusion of roles was a recipe for crossed-wires and delay. Gostwick and his colleagues in London were trying to play by the rules and maximise returns for the King; Cromwell at Court, on the other hand, was alive to the realities of politics and patronage but was often too busy with bigger matters to give his proper attention to the to-and-fro of negotiations. Finally, and caught in the middle, were the newly appointed bishops, with Shaxton at their head.24
Shaxton was consecrated by Cranmer, again in St Stephen’s Chapel, on 11 April 1535. By then all the formalities should have been over. But the issue of his ‘temporalities’, as the estates of the bishopric were known, was still in negotiation. By the end of May the outlines of a settlement were visible. Shaxton would give securities for the staged payments of his First Fruits, which amounted to one year’s net revenue of his see. In return the King would tide him over with a grant of the previous half year’s income of the bishopric, from September 1534 to March 1535. The agreement would be given effect in the formal instrument, known as the Custodias Temporalium or Restitution of Temporalities, which permitted the new Bishop of Salisbury to receive the income of his see. On 27 May, Shaxton wrote to Cromwell, asking him to order Popley to prepare the Restitution of Temporalities as agreed for the King’s signature. He was still waiting for it a week later on 4 June. And it was only on 8 July–the last business day before the start of the Progress–that it was signed by the King.25
It is impossible to penetrate fully the workings in this instance of the Tudor ‘Circumlocution Office’. But it seems probable that it was Anne who finally cut the Gordian Knot with a direct approach to Henry. She also helped Shaxton out with a loan of £200 from her own purse.
Despite the delays, Shaxton’s settlement with the Office of First Fruits and Tenths came to be regarded as a model by the other new bishops, all of whom were closely associated with Anne. Edward Foxe, the great theoretician of the Divorce and Supremacy, got Hereford, Hugh Latimer Worcester and John Hilsey Rochester. All had formed part of the great road-show of the 1535 Progress, during which Latimer, as we have seen, was particularly active. Now, they, too, were sent off to cut a deal with Gostwick’s office.
Foxe’s experiences are unknown but Latimer and Hilsey acted as a team with the ebullient Latimer naturally taking the lead. They left Court for London on about 21 August, while the King and Queen were staying at Thornbury. Before leaving they had an interview with Cromwell, also at Thornbury, in which they requested that ‘they may pay their First Fruits as the Bishop of Salisbury does’. Cromwell agreed and promised to write to Gostwick to this effect. But when Latimer and Hilsey met Gostwick on 29 August, the Treasurer informed them that he had received no such letter. They both continued to badger Gostwick and six days later, on 4 September, Latimer also tackled Polsted, but Polsted had heard nothing from Cromwell either.26
Latimer was now losing patience and, immediately after his frustrating meeting with Polsted, wrote Cromwell a characteristically blunt letter. Things would have been sorted out more quickly if he had remained at Court, he said. He also reminded Cromwell that he had other, even more powerful, friends. His first intention, he recalled, had been ‘to have gone to the King’s Grace myself’. ‘But’, he continued, ‘the Queen’s Grace, calling to remembrance what end my lord of Salisbury [Shaxton] was at, said I should not need to move the King, but that it should be enough to inform your mastership thereof.’ Anne, characteristically, had put her money where her mouth was and had given Latimer, as well, a loan: £200 for which he entered into a bond on 18 August.27
Despite Latimer’s near-ultimatum, another inconclusive meeting with Polsted followed on 11 September. It was now Hilsey’s turn to write a despairing letter to Cromwell. ‘Since I have come to London’, he informed him, ‘I have done nothing and can do nothing.’ It was only on 15 September that the minister’s instructions concerning Rochester finally reach Polsted.28
But by then, having fought their bruising encounter with bureaucracy to a draw, the bishops-elect were on their way back to Court.
The Progress had reached Winchester in Hampshire. Winchester was the old capital, with a noble cathedral to match. And the cathedral was now the setting for one of the most extraordinary scenes of the Reformation.
In mid-September, Jean de Dinteville, who had been painted by Holbein in The Ambassadors on an earlier mission to England, arrived at Winchester as a special envoy. At his first audience, either he or a member of his suite presented Marguerite of Navarre’s compliments to Anne and Henry. ‘The Queen’, the report of the interview continued, ‘said that her greatest wish, next to having a son, is to see you [Marguerite] again.’29
But Dinteville bore disturbing news. Clement VII had died in 1534 and had been succeeded as Pope by Alessandro Farnese who had taken the title Paul III. Despite Paul’s luxurious Court, his artistic patronage and the ‘unlimited nepotism’ he used to advance his already-powerful family to still greater things, he took his religion more seriously than his predecessor. He was outraged by Henry’s conduct, and the beheading of Fisher, whom he had made a Cardinal just before his execution, was the last straw. In late July, ‘at the unanimous solicitation’ of the College of Cardinals, Pope Paul III ‘deprived [Henry] of his kingdom and royal dignity’ and wrote a ‘Brief ’ or letter to Francis to ask him to give effect to the sentence.30
Francis, of course, had no intention of doing any such thing. Instead he hoped to use the Brief as diplomatic blackmail to secure English support for renewed French intervention in Italy. But the plan backfired. Henry was far too concerned at the possible impact of the Brief on English domestic politics to have the inclination for foreign adventures and Dinteville left England empty-handed after only two weeks.
But how to respond to the Brief? Henry, according to Chapuys’s informants, ‘appeared sad and melancholy when he had read the letters [Dinteville] presented’ and he summoned the leading bishops to Winchester for an emergency meeting. Those attending included Foxe, Cranmer and of course the Bishop of Winchester himself, Stephen Gardiner.31
But, before the consultations got underway, Henry and Anne decided on a gesture of defiance. They would take advantage of the gathering of prelates in the city to stage a major ceremony. Since the break with Rome, the consecrations of English bishops had been hole-in-corner affairs–performed, like Cranmer’s and Shaxton’s, in the decent obscurity of St Stephen’s Chapel. Now, to face down doubters at home and abroad, they would go public. Thus, on 19 September, in Winchester Cathedral, the three most recently appointed bishops, Foxe of Hereford, Latimer of Worcester and Hilsey of Rochester, were consecrated together. The consecration was performed by Cranmer himself; the cream of the English episcopate was present as, almost certainly, were Henry and Anne. Henry was there to defy the Pope; Anne to give her support to ‘her’ bishops. She had solicited their appointments and had worked vigorously to remove the bureaucratic obstacles thrown in their way by Gostwick and his colleagues.32
Now she had her reward as she started to shape an episcopate in the image of her own Reforming piety.
The bishops then got down to the task of countering the Papal Brief and, over the next ten days, they laboured furiously. The lead was taken by Gardiner. The last three years had not been kind to him. He had fallen badly foul of both Henry and Anne with his resistance to the Supremacy in the Convocation of 1532, and neither fully trusted him ever again. In April 1534 he had been rusticated to his diocese and told not to return to Court until summoned. He had also been stripped of the Secretaryship which–inevitably–was given to Cromwell. A year later he had come within a whisker of treason and Henry had ordered Cromwell to investigate him on suspicion of ‘coloured doubleness’ over the Supremacy.
But he survived. Now the crisis provoked by the Papal Brief gave him the opportunity to rehabilitate himself. According to Chapuys, the King’s Council was in complete disarray: they were ‘quite astonished without knowing where to begin’. And only Gardiner’s intervention rescued the situation. He, among all the bishops, had the readiest pen and the most incisive mind. He also knew how to work fast.33
Within a few days he had completed drafts of two works. One was a direct answer to Paul’s Brief. The Pope laments the death of bad men, like Fisher, and rejoices in those of the good, Gardiner wrote. Moreover he does so in extravagant words put in his mouth by a petty little orator (rhetorculus), his secretary Bloxius, who bemoans Fisher’s death as monstrously cruel when in fact it was the gentlest that could be devised and he was ‘killed with a sudden stroke of the sword’. And so on. Gardiner’s answer is bitter and mocking and was obviously written in the heat of the moment. His other work, however, was longer and more reflective. It could, such was his facility, have been knocked out in the week or so following Dinteville’s arrival. Or it might have been prepared earlier, during his months of exile at Winchester, and pulled out of the hat only now.
It was entitled De Vera Obedientia (Of True Obedience), and, like Tyndale’s similarly entitled Obedience of a Christian Man, it defended the Royal Supremacy on the grounds of Scripture and attacked the Papal Monarchy on the same basis. Gardiner concluded by acknowledging frankly that he had once sworn an oath to the Pope. He had done so in good faith. But, as he had subsequently discovered, he had been wrong. And the oath was wrong, too. Therefore, because it is a recognised principle of both civil and canon law ‘that no man is bounden to perform an unlawful oath’, he was released with no stain on his integrity. As were all other Englishmen who had done the same.
Both Gardiner’s works were circulated for comment among a select group, including Cranmer, Foxe and Cromwell. Foxe was seriously worried by the passage in which Gardiner defended the breach of his oath and wrote in strict confidence to Cromwell about it. ‘If this were taken for an example’, he pointed out, ‘the malice of men might elude such oaths [to the Boleyn succession] as we have now lately made.’ ‘I have turned down the leaf ’, he continued, ‘and marked the place with a hand.’34
Foxe’s point was a shrewd one. Nevertheless, the passage was left untouched. Cranmer, on the other hand, proposed a lengthy addition to the answer. At this point, Cromwell called for the text of the answer to read it himself. Gardiner was frustrated. He had intended, he wrote to Cromwell, to sit up all night and polish it, as he had already done with his De Vera Obedientia. But this was now impossible as he was sending the only copy to Cromwell. If Cromwell would bring it up to London, where he was about to deliver De Vera Obedientia to the royal printer, Thomas Berthelet, he would finish it off too. ‘I will in a day and a night put it in mundum [into the world],’ he boasted.35
This was the old Gardiner. Power and favour were a tonic, and he was in his element again.
But, within a few weeks, he was sent away from Court once more as ambassador to France. Did Henry guess that his Council was not big enough for both Cromwell and Gardiner? Was Anne working to remove another enemy?
As it happened, Gardiner’s Embassy lasted for three years. When he returned to England in 1538 it was to a new world. For three Queens had died in the interim.